Conformity and Change: Community Effects on Female Genital Cutting in Kenya
Dados Bibliográficos
| AUTOR(ES) | |
|---|---|
| AFILIAÇÃO(ÕES) | Sarah R. Hayford is a doctoral candidate in demography at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also studied as a Mellon Foundation trainee in demography at the Université de Montréal. She is interested in processes of social change in both developed and developing countries; her dissertation focuses on the changing relationship between marriage and fertility trajectories in the United States. In the fall of 2005, she will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University funded through the National... |
| ANO | 2005 |
| TIPO | Artigo |
| PERIÓDICO | Journal of Health and Social Behavior |
| ISSN | 0022-1465 |
| E-ISSN | 2150-6000 |
| EDITORA | JSTOR (United States) |
| DOI | 10.1177/002214650504600201 |
| CITAÇÕES | 9 |
| ADICIONADO EM | 2025-08-18 |
| MD5 |
481f8b73fb231c1cf0a04b488a750a35
|
Resumo
In this article, I analyze women's decisions to have their daughters circumcised based on data from 7,873 women in Kenya collected in the 1998 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. I use multilevel models to assess the degree to which women's decisions are correlated with the decisions of other women in their community, in addition to studying the effects of socioeconomic characteristics measured at both the individual and community levels. I find some support for modernization theories, which argue that economic development leads to gradual erosion of the practice of female circumcision. However, more community-level variation is explained by the convention hypothesis, which proposes that the prevalence of female circumcision will decline rapidly once parents see that a critical mass of other parents have stopped circumcising their daughters. I also find substantial variation among different ethnic groups in the pace and onset of the decline of female genital cutting.